The new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned that at least one new strain of COVID-19 is resistant to antibodies, but assured vaccines are still effective against new variants.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who has been nominated by President-elect Joe Biden to be the next head of the CDC, made the comments during a Sunday interview on CBS ‘Face the Nation.
In a grimmer forecast, Walensky said she expects the US to hit as many as 500,000 virus-related deaths by mid-February, warning of “ dark weeks ahead. ” Currently, the nation’s total is just shy of 398,000.
In recent weeks, a number of new strains of the coronavirus have emerged, including in the UK, South Africa, Brazil and even the US.
Concerns have subsequently been fueled that current treatments and vaccines may not be effective in dealing with the new strains, but Walensky said such fears are currently unfounded.
“We’ve known for a long time that viruses mutate, not just the coronavirus, but every virus,” she said. So far, that from the UK seems to be more transferable.
“We have no information whether it is avoiding our vaccines,” Walensky continued. “We have indications that this probably isn’t the case.”
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who has been nominated by President-elect Joe Biden to be the next head of the CDC, made the comments during a Sunday interview on CBS ‘Face the Nation’
A nursing home employee receives the COVID-19 vaccine on Friday at the Harlem Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation
The expert promised that “further studies” are underway to determine the effectiveness of the vaccine on the new strains.
Walensky also spoke in regards to a report claiming that the new South African strain COVID-19 is resistant to antibody therapies.
The doctor confirmed to Fox that she had “heard similar things” about the antibodies used in treatments such as the Regeneron therapy used to treat President Trump.
“I think there is concern about not only the South African and Brazilian species, but also that other future species may be resistant to those antibodies,” Walensky said. “Don’t remove all efficacy, but decrease it.”
Walensky affirmed that she believed the best way to address potential problems with mutations is to identify them as early as possible. She also called on Biden to ensure that public health systems have the necessary resources to be adequately prepared.
The main concern, she said, would be that a lack of investment and preparation for such a development could drastically delay the reopening of public schools – one of Biden’s main goals for his first few months in office.
The new British variant of the virus appears to be much more transmissible than the original strain.
CDC experts have warned that the ‘super-COVID’ strain could become dominant in the US in March, leading to massive spikes in coronavirus cases.
At least 96 people in 16 states have already discovered cases of the highly contagious B117 variant, according to DailyMail.com tracking.
In a grimmer forecast, Walensky said she expects the US to hit as many as 500,000 virus-related deaths by mid-February and warned of “ dark weeks ahead. ”
At least 96 people in 16 states have already discovered cases of the highly contagious B117 variant, according to DailyMail.com’s tracking.
The CDC declined to predict how many more cases and deaths the variant will lead to in the US.
But it is thought to be up to twice as contagious, and ‘a faster rate of transmission will lead to more cases, increasing the number of individuals in general needing clinical care, adding to the burden on an already strained healthcare system and causing more deaths’ , they wrote in a report on Friday.
The US now also has three homegrown variants.
All three are suspected to be more contagious than the currently more common variants, and one of them is nearly identical to the UK variant.
Utah and Illinois each reported their first cases of the British variant on Friday.
California, meanwhile, has emerged as a cluster for the British variant, with a total of 34 cases. Florida also has at least 22 cases of the mutated strain.
Since the pandemic began in March 2020, the US has recorded more than 23.93 million coronavirus cases and 397,574 deaths.
Walensky also made a grim prediction on Sunday that the US will hit 500,000 dead by mid-February.
She noted that the country has reached nearly 4,000 deaths per day and a total of nearly 400,000 deaths from the coronavirus.
“We expect half a million deaths in this country by mid-February,” she said.
Walensky emphasized that those numbers do not represent the “tens of thousands” of people who have recovered from COVID-19 but have an “uncharacterized syndrome.”
She also said the US has not yet seen “the fallout from what happened to the vacation trips,” which, according to the incoming director, will lead to “high rates of hospital admissions and subsequent deaths.”
“I think we have a few more dark weeks,” she said.
